Love & Passion Quote by Angela Carter

Carter takes the one place our culture still likes to brand as private - the bed - and yanks it under fluorescent light. By pairing it with the dinner table, she collapses the romance of the bedroom into the politics of domestic ritual: two sites where we perform, negotiate, and, crucially, get judged. The shock isn’t just sexual frankness. It’s the suggestion that intimacy has been annexed by the same etiquette, roles, and power games that govern “respectable” social life.

“Public” here doesn’t mean literally on display; it means legible, regulated, available for scrutiny. A dinner table is where families stage civility while smuggling in hierarchy: who serves, who speaks, who’s allowed to refuse. Carter implies the bed has become similarly scripted - a place of “formal confrontation,” where desire is less spontaneous than procedural, a clash of expectations shaped by gender, class, and the marketplace of romance. Even the word “governed” carries a chill: sex as administered territory rather than liberated pleasure.

Context matters. Writing in the late 20th century, Carter is in dialogue with second-wave feminism’s critique of the private sphere as a political arena. She’s also responding to a media-saturated culture that commodifies sex while policing it, turning liberation into another performance with rules and penalties. The line works because it refuses the comforting myth that intimacy is a refuge from society; it’s one of society’s most disciplined stages, where power learns new manners.